Elton John piano will play globally from O.C. event

Jan. 18, 2013

Updated Aug. 21, 2013 1:17 p.m.

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Elton John, shown performing his show "The Red Piano" at Caesars Palace hotel and casino in Las Vegas in 2009, will play a piano at the upcoming NAMM show in Anaheim that will be digitally linked to pianos around the world. JAE C. HONG, ASSOCIATED PRESS

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Elton John's red grand piano that was customized by Yamaha is a Disklavier, which allows the sound to be set to Elton John's specifications. This was the only one made by Yamaha, though it inspired the production of a limited edition red baby grand piano signed by Elton John. PAUL RODRIGUEZ, THE ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

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A limited edition signed Elton John red baby grand piano that was inspired by the red grand piano Yamaha customized for Elton John sits at Yamaha's Buena Park headquarters. Yamaha is celebrating it's 50th anniversary in Buena Park this year. PAUL RODRIGUEZ, THE ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

Elton John, shown performing his show "The Red Piano" at Caesars Palace hotel and casino in Las Vegas in 2009, will play a piano at the upcoming NAMM show in Anaheim that will be digitally linked to pianos around the world. JAE C. HONG, ASSOCIATED PRESS

JAN. 23 UPDATE: Yamaha announced it will stream the concert free online, even for those without a piano. Visit http://eltonjohn125.usa.yamaha.com or http://www.eltonjohn.com during the event, which kicks off at 8 p.m. Pacific time on Friday Jan. 25. Elton John will perform around 10:25 p.m.. Also performing during the three-hour event will be Amy Grant, Chaka Khan, Dave Grusin, Earth, Wind & Fire, David Foster, Dave Koz, James Newton Howard, LEOGUN, Landon Pigg, Lucy Schwartz, Michael McDonald, Sarah McLachlan, Toto and Sinbad.

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When Elton John comes to Anaheim this month, he won't just pound the keys on his flaming red custom Yamaha, he'll also be playing dozens of pianos spread across the globe, all at the same time.

No, the pop star hasn't been cloned. In an attempt to add some luster to the player piano, the Japanese piano maker Yamaha, with its U.S. base in Buena Park, will digitally link a fleet of its high-tech $20,000-plus Disklavier pianos on Jan. 25 so that audiences around the world can hear John play "live."

Whether the technology will do anything to change the diminished place pianos hold in modern life is unclear. Even so, the idea of broadcasting an artist's performance this way has stirred excitement in the music world.

"You're actually hearing a live instrument playing at its source, with the only unique factor being that the performer is 12,000 miles away," said Edward Bilous, director of the center for innovation in the arts at the Juilliard School in New York. "The Disklavier becomes one instrument that is (that) big."

Pianos that play without anyone in front of them have been around since the late 1800s and rose to prominence in the 1920s as one of the earliest and most popular ways of bringing recorded music into the home. Yamaha hopes its streaming concert technology could spark new interest in the instrument.

John's concert and its worldwide accompaniment are the near-final realization of a technology project brewing for 25 years. For decades, the big idea for Yamaha employees was to have an artist's performance in one location experienced by many listeners, not re-created by speakers but beamed over the air and reproduced with pinpoint accuracy by a musical instrument.

In Anaheim, when Elton John plays his "Nikita" red Yamaha Disklavier piano, phantom fingers will play similar Yamaha pianos in Japan, Korea, Russia, Canada and other locations around the world. He is performing at a private concert at the Hyperion Theater inside Disney's California Adventure as part of the National Association of Music Merchants annual show.

"It is wonderful in terms of how I feel," said Bill Brandom, a former senior technical manager at Yamaha who retired in 2011 after 31 years at the company. "I can see the dream came true."

Brandom still consults for the company and remembers employees imagining the potential of a phantom artist playing a Disklavier live. Yamaha introduced the brand of piano in 1987 in the United States; the instrument could play itself with hidden electromechanical solenoids (essentially magnets) playing the keys. He told sales staff to talk to dealers and customers about the concept of beaming a performance over the air.

Yamaha initially used floppy discs and then CDs to play recorded music before moving to the Internet about six years ago. For the past three years, the company has been working to sync up audio from singing and other instruments with video of a performance to round out a full entertainment experience.

The company demonstrated a multicontinent performance in March last year with three pianos in New York playing an abstract piece together. Only one player was on stage; the other two pianists in Orange County and Japan appeared on projection screens. In September singer Sarah McLachlan performed a concert playing a Disklavier at her studio in Canada that was broadcast to other pianos in the United States. The performance by Elton John, who has a longstanding endorsement deal with the musical instrument company, will be the first global broadcast of the technology.

The Internet, not air, ended up as the medium to convey the artist's music.

"The experience has been much more dramatic than I envisioned," Brandom said.

That's because when Brandom and his co-workers originally envisioned the endeavor, home stereos and TV systems weren't that advanced. But today's HD screens and surround-sound speaker systems can allow an entire concert to beam into a home in high fidelity – with the live piano rounding out the concert experience.

This technology "is the piano's ability to remain relevant in the 21st-century multimedia living room," said Jim Levesque, marketing manager at Yamaha.

Yamaha plans to launch the streaming concert technology this spring as part of the company's existing subscription radio service for about $200 a year or $20 a month.

The radio service allows owners of the pianos, which range from $20,000 to $170,000, to set them to specific stations of streaming piano music.

Other forms of entertainment born in the 20th century have left the instrument playing second string, but Yamaha hopes the technology provides new reasons for the piano to be in homes and schools.

"The obvious benefits for employing the Internet for musical performance art is for people who aren't in the same location to play together, and people who aren't in the location where the music is played can enjoy it," said Christopher Dobrian, a music professor at the UC Irvine Claire Trevor School of the Arts who has worked on synchronizing performances over the Internet.

"It's very much more exciting to hear it come out of a real piano than to hear it come out of speakers."

The high-tech gadgetry might be too pricey for most, but it provides a new forum for the piano.

"The piano industry in the 20th century you might say has seen a steady decline," said Stephen Carver, senior piano technician at Juilliard. "It continues to hold an utter fascination for a small percentage of the population. ... I think it's a durable thing in society."

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